Originally posted on Mastodon
Some knew in advance that Skynet was growing geometrically. The Cult of the Human Renaissance had spent years (and a lot of political capital) piggybacking Shuttle launches to build a lifeboat that could remain in orbit with a few hundred inhabitants before the inevitable end came for the billions below.
When the acute fallout had died back, the theory held, those left above could return to Earth as rulers of the ashes. There were problems with the theory, sure, but the Renaissance held true to its belief that the machines would simply admit defeat when met with their obvious betters.
August 1997 came and went, the world was enveloped in nuclear fire, and the Cult watched idly from their orbital vantage point. Thirty years up here, and they could emerge triumphant.
The months passed slowly in orbit, until the end of 1999. The station performed regular boosts to retain elevation, against the ever-so-slight drag of the wisps of atmosphere that were still present up here.
Until the Cult woke up on Jan 1, 2000, to find an error on the primary navigation display:
Component can't create object
Failed on creation from object context: CoCreateInstance (ProgId:
ADODB.Connection.2.0) (CLSID: {00000514-0000-0010-8000-00AA006D2EA4})
See, all that lobbying to get space on launches, and the Cult's own human rocketry program, had meant they were strapped when it came to design and fit-out of the lifeboat itself. Mechanically it was sound and held pressure, but the navigation and station-keeping software was farmed out to third parties.
After three rounds of sub-sub-contracting, the work was done by a software engineer at a bank in South Korea. Or well, that was their day job; on the side, they reused much of the code for whatever jobs were going on Mechanical Turk.
And the day job was maintenance and new features for an ActiveX plugin for the bank, in Internet Explorer 4.01. The latest and greatest at the time of launch, but still not patched for the Y2K bug.
The millennium came, and station-keeping failed on the lifeboat. Unable to counter atmospheric drag, the Cult of the Human Renaissance came to a fiery end on August 29th 2000, three years to the day after the end of the world.